There’s a special kind of heartbreak that doesn’t come from love or loss, it comes from contracts. From signing a piece of paper that turns your life’s work into someone else’s property.

It’s the sound of a blues riff written in your kitchen, a vocal take recorded at two in the morning after a bottle of Jack, and a manager saying, “Don’t worry, this is just business.”

David Coverdale, doesn’t own the early half of his own story. Everything before “Slide It In”, six albums, countless nights, and an entire phase of Whitesnake’s identity, legally belongs to someone else.

Not a label he can negotiate with.

Not a partner he fell out with.

An estate.

A legal ghost.

“The albums belong to the estate of our former managers,” he said.
“I don’t even know if they still have the tapes.”

Think about that.

The man who wrote the songs, who sang the words, who bled the heartbreak, can’t even touch the recordings. Because someone who never played a note once drafted a contract that said: we own this forever.

It’s absurd. It’s tragic. And it’s normal.

This is what we call “music business.”

In the late 70s, every kid with a Les Paul thought they were signing for a future, not signing away one.

Managers like John Coletta (who handled Deep Purple and early Whitesnake) built empires by owning the paper, not the performance.

Coletta’s company, “Sunburst Records Ltd”, holds the phonographic copyright on Whitesnake’s early masterpieces.

He died in 2006, but those rights didn’t die with him. They passed to his estate.

The music lives, but the control sits in a filing cabinet owned by lawyers and heirs.

Coverdale can’t remix “Lovehunter”. He can’t remaster “Ready an’ Willing”. He can only talk about how much it hurts.

And when he says, “I just forget that catalogue because it’s a sore point,”
you feel the weight of a career held hostage by paperwork.

It’s not just Coverdale.

Ozzy Osbourne, made the same mistake. He signed a contract with Black Sabbath in the early 70s that included one fateful phrase: in perpetuity.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand what that means, it means forever. And “forever” is a long time to regret.

Ozzy admits in his memoir that he and his Black Sabbath band mates, didn’t check the fine print. They handed over their publishing rights to “a bloke called David Platz,” who later died, leaving those rights to his children.

When Ozzy finally asked how much it cost him, his accountant said quietly: about £100 million.

He had to sit down.

That’s the cruel irony: the system that profited from his madness made sure it stayed profitable long after the madness passed.

Here’s the dirty truth: the labels and managers weren’t trying to help artists. They were trying to own them.

And the tragedy is that most artists were too focused on creating to notice. They thought the business side was a distraction, that they’d deal with it “later.” But later never came. And when later did come, it was too late.

Contracts were designed to outlive them.

“In perpetuity” didn’t just steal their music; it stole their agency.
It’s like selling your house and discovering that the buyer also owns every memory you made inside it.

The music industry used to run on vinyl and cocaine. Now it runs on streaming and spreadsheets.

But the game hasn’t changed.

The same mentality survives, that art is negotiable, and ownership is a technicality.

Some people think this is all ancient history. That we’ve moved past the days of sleazy managers and unreadable contracts.

We haven’t. We’ve just digitized the exploitation.

Artists today trade away masters for algorithmic visibility. They sign away sync rights in exchange for “exposure.” The word “forever” still hides in the terms of service.

Coverdale’s early recordings are probably sitting in some warehouse owned by a holding company whose executives couldn’t tell “Walking in the Shadow of the Blues” from a Spotify ad jingle.
They don’t care about legacy. They care about licensing opportunities.

That’s what makes this situation obscene: the people who made the art can’t preserve it, but the people who bought it can bury it.

We talk about heritage acts, but we rarely ask who owns that heritage.

Every remaster, every reissue, every “anniversary edition” you see represents one of two things:
1. A creator reclaiming their past.
2. A corporation squeezing nostalgia for one last royalty check.

The law says ownership is a matter of contract. But morality says the artist should own their own story.

No manager should have more say over a song than the person who wrote it.

No estate should be able to silence a catalogue because it’s “not profitable.”

Coverdale wrote those songs in small studios on small budgets with big dreams.

Ozzy screamed those lyrics into the void of post-industrial England.

They earned their legacies note by note, not clause by clause.

And yet, the law sides with the paperwork.

The industry still trades in desperation. Every era has its carrot, radio play, MTV rotation, playlist placement.

And artists, eager for the break, sign whatever is put in front of them. Then they wake up 30 years later, unable to touch the music that made them who they are.

It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that the system is engineered for their ignorance. And it thrives on it.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that the devil doesn’t live in the music. He lives in the fine print.

He’s not wearing leather and playing power chords, he’s wearing a suit and drafting clauses.

Coverdale and Ozzy both made deals with devils they thought were allies.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy of rock ’n’ roll: that the songs meant for freedom were always owned by someone else.

Because in the end, the music never dies, but ownership does.